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The private eco with commerce seems quite strong to me giving free buildings, taxes and money to keep the workers happy. What do you guys think?

ORIGINAL: Keifre

The private eco with commerce seems quite strong to me giving free buildings, taxes and money to keep the workers happy. What do you guys think?

I'm playing a 4-way multi-player game right now where, on a whim, I decided to go all-in libertarian (max privatization, minimal public spending) to see what happens and how the game handles it. We're 26 rounds into the game and I have built almost no public assets - I decided I had to have one private level-1 metal mine and one private level-1 industry. I also decided I'd have a small bureaucratic capability and would run logistics as a public asset - I don't think the private economy would do that properly.

Beyond that I have neither raised taxes (indeed I've failed twice to lower income taxes) nor built other assets.

At round 26 my population and worker happiness are through the roof (100) and I am weathering an epoch of unrest (crisis of passion) with no noticeable effect. The private economy is building stuff at a clip of nearly one asset per turn. They just started industry III. Free folk flock to the capital.

However, on the flip side, I am in last place victory point wise by a significant margin. I am just now starting to reap the benefits of the private economy through service tax but I think I'm still far behind the other nations of the world. My army is very small, my treasury revenue is just barely staying ahead of expenses, IP points are only just now starting to be delivered in useful quantities and I am just beginning to embark on significant territorial expansion, well after and far behind everyone else.

Unfortunately, I also started in a poor position (isolated in a northern wasteland) and with sub-par leaders. So that muddles the experiment a bit as I'm not sure how much those factors combined with my inexpert play are factoring into the outcome.

It remains very unclear whether I'll be able to parley this into a workable global strategy in the game's future. I suspect being so extremely privatized will turn out to not be the best strategy - but, maybe with just a little more public spending a workable strategy might be found.

It's all very interesting and awesome that the game system allows us to explore these varied lines of play. Very enjoyable.

-Mark R.

ORIGINAL: Keifre

The private eco with commerce seems quite strong to me giving free buildings, taxes and money to keep the workers happy. What do you guys think?

It is more of a mixed bag, really:
- Their food I never touch. It is the primary way to feed private citizens. And the kickbacks for workers and troops are nice. It also has 0 Upkeep.
- For mining assets, 9 of 10 cases I nationalize their buildings. They pull the same amount out of the ground but only give me a fraction. Fuel on a planet with hard terrain was the remaing case thus far. But with the Airforce, that fuel might be especially usefull now.
I always Nationalizethe Scavenger and then Trucksop, if I somehow start on Tech Level 3.
- your workers (and Soldier Recruitment bonus) measure themself against the Private Salary. Wich can be as low as 1 miliCredit. Or as high as 7 miliCredits. And if it is a higher value, you have to pay your workers and recruits a lot to get them to join you! So make sure never to have a shortage of Private Workers.
- The QOL bildings it builds drag up your Civilisation score. And I do not like a high civilisation score. Or at least not uncontrolled increases of the score.

Ive gone for more of a middle of the road strategy in the current game. One of the big issues with a fully private economy is when they start setting up mines and recycling facilities you loose a lot of the materials to the private economy.

Im getting the impression in the the current game the planet is very resource scarce.....so my view is the resources need to be carefully managed.

On the flip side - Im leaving the private economy to deal with all the food production - as I find if you have public food production alongside the private food producing assets it soaks up large numbers of your population....I thikn this does limit how much you can expand your military.

So far I think one town approx 50k population can support about 1 bde of troops with food with private food producing assets only....but thats just a rough working estimate - and we only have the option of domed farming.

In my current ongoing game I didn't find a metal deposit until turn 60, just as my first demetalization plant was coming online. As a consequence I only ever built 1 level of public industry for a whopping 50 industrial points of output. However, because I have the Free Market and Corporations regime feats, I am actually generating slightly above 1000 industrial points per turn between my 6 zones (4 of which I founded myself and boosted with the Commerce private economy booster cards to get more light industry built early). I had 10k industry sitting in the SHQ just waiting for me to find some metal so I could actually spend it.

EDIT: 370 of that industry generation is from service tax, so if I had Citizen Service Oath from Enforcement instead, I'd be generating more at this point. Although that assumes I would've had the same immigration without a wealthy private sector building QOL, and Enforcement is probably harder to boost - to get Commerce high I just handed out corporate board memberships like candy in addition to ruthlessly deprioritizing the other two economic profiles in decisions.

If you focus on the private industry you need to have many different cities so you have many light industry assets. And you need to spam the "Private Investment" and "Investor backup" stratagems.
Investor backup is for new and small cities as it is always 1k to 2k cash, private investment is for big cities, then it gives 2k to 3k cash.

IC will come in mass if you have multiple cities if private industry and the 40% and 80% private economy buff from the commerce profile. You really don't need to build the IC industry building.

You should have high taxes (50%) to afford to buy resources and pay for logistics and BP.


On big maps you can actually live without bureaucratic assets, using the enforcement profile to harvest BP from the service tax. But turn time is so high, it makes no fun.

I had 10k industry sitting in the SHQ just waiting for me to find some metal so I could actually spend it.

Somewhat off topic, but if you found at least some rare metals, a simple change to Polymer armor can allow you to produce vehicles anyway.

Steel armor is only good if metal is abundant. And while Polymer is generally seen as a Upgrade to Steel Armor - if it is all you got, no reason not to beeline for it.

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

I had 10k industry sitting in the SHQ just waiting for me to find some metal so I could actually spend it.

Somewhat off topic, but if you found at least some rare metals, a simple change to Polymer armor can allow you to produce vehicles anyway.

Steel armor is only good if metal is abundant. And while Polymer is generally seen as a Upgrade to Steel Armor - if it is all you got, no reason not to beeline for it.

I fully agree. polymer amour allows diversifying your mineral needs. Metals for buildings, rares for military. Provided you have access to both.

Yes, I know what polymer armor does. In this case I had some really annoying evasive absorption polymer critters in the way of my expansion that weren't guaranteed to be consistently hittable by light tanks even with HV guns, and I rolled light aircraft and went for that instead since they had big enough bombs, but as it turns out bombs eat a lot of metal and even after I got air-to-ground rockets, airstriking critters is a lot less efficient than surrounding and overrunning them with ground units. Also, naturally I missed turboprops and rolled soil filtration as the dead last tier 2 economic tech, though obviously there's plenty I could've done better in that game besides having better luck.